Main menu

Search

How can I stop a blue screen of death in Windows 10?

Simon recently encountered the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. He suspected it may be his Chrome browser. Could it be? Leo says that modern versions of Windows don't really allow a program to call a BSOD these days. The operating system protects against it. But it could be a bad driver. Flakey hardware like a power supply or loose RAM can also cause it. But Chrome doesn't have system access to cause a BSOD. If he can replicate it, that could lead him toward the culprit. If it's crashing right away, that's usually a hardware issue.

How about booting into safe mode? If he can do that, then it's definitely a driver issue, and it's almost always a bad video driver. He should download the latest drivers for his computer, then reinstall them. While in safe mode, he can type "Recovery" and then he can run Windows 10 recovery to fix it. He can choose to "reset this PC" and "keep my files," and it will refresh the system. Worst case scenario, he can wipe the drive and start over.